LOS ANGELES — Have you ever noticed how the most ardent defenders of fighting in hockey either resort to name-calling or fall back on the tired refrain about it always having been part of the game in order to support their position?
For a very, very long time, goaltenders playing without masks was part of the game until someone, namely Jacques Plante, decided protecting his face was a tad more important that adhering to the status quo.
It took courage for Plante, both one of the game’s great individualists as well as one of the NHL’s all-time goaltenders, to put on a mask after his face had been sliced at the Garden on Nov. 1, 1959, when hit by a puck shot by the Rangers’ Andy Bathgate. Even more so because Canadiens coach Toe Blake ridiculed Plante mercilessly for seeking protection.
Just as it will take courage for current players — as well as club and league executives — to speak up on behalf of common sense safety and, once and for all, purge league-endorsed fighting from the 21st Century NHL.
The point has been made here repeatedly. These aren’t your fights from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s or ’80s. Fighters today are massive, weight-trained punchers who do damage with every blow to the head they land.
And, far more often than not, today’s fighters are designated to play that role, whereas in the old days — the days that established the NHL’s so-called tradition and, ugh, code — the best players in the league invariably were the ones to drop their gloves.
Let’s be honest here: It is not called the Donald Brashear Hat Trick.
It simply is intellectually dishonest to claim commitment to reducing the number of concussions in hockey by legislating against checks to the head while blithely permitting players to punch each other in the head. The brain does not necessarily distinguish between punishments absorbed.
Bob Probert, among the most celebrated heavyweights in NHL history, did not contract the brain disease CTE, discovered posthumously, because of taking too many cross-checks up high.
Lightning general manager Steve Yzerman, Penguins GM Ray Shero and Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford all went on record last week with TSN’s Darren Dreger in support of re-evaluating the role of fighting in hockey. Predictably, the knee-jerk was to disparage them and discount their views because — wait for it — their teams may not traditionally rank among the league leaders in fighting majors.
Gary Bettman, when on Thursday in Phoenix asked for his take on reconsidering the role of fighting in the NHL, said, “For every action, there is a reaction.”
The commissioner is correct, just as he was in citing, “The law of unintended consequences.”
That, by the way, as opposed to the intended consequence of exacting punishment on the Canucks for the Roberto Luongo front-loaded contract.
But it’s true. It is not possible at the moment to declare with certainty the ramifications of legislating fighting out of hockey. We do know designated enforcers will become obsolete, and for those good people, that is unfortunate, but that will open the door for players with more varied skills.
The NHL always has been about survival of the fittest. When the new rules were enacted coming out of the 2004-05 lockout, plodding defensemen who made their living by clearing the front, often so by cross-checks to the lower back (Mike Bossy still is wincing in pain) no longer could keep up. The NHLPA did not argue on their behalf against the rules changes.
Bettman said, and again accurately, all the quotes he had read from players were in support of the status quo. But players were unanimously opposed to the salary cap, and no one from the league office has ever valued their opinions on that subject.
Players can’t be expected to turn on their own, certainly not against teammates who may (or may not) offer a sense of protection. But what protection, really, when one pugilist squares off against another? Buffalo last year added slow-footed enforcer John Scott in the aftermath of the previous season’s Milan Lucic-Ryan Miller incident, and the Sabres somehow were still a bad team.
“We’ve always done it that way,” “It’s part of the game’s heritage” and “The fans love it,” can’t be valid defenses for the status quo. You’ll note how “Nobody gets hurt in fights” has disappeared from the lexicon, because, as we know, people do get hurt, and sometimes badly, in fights.
Beanballs were once an accepted part of baseball. No more. We have learned too much about the effect of blows to the brain to simply turn a blind eye to the ramifications of some of our sports’ most storied traditions.
It is time for the NHL and NHLPA to form a joint committee of executives, retired players and physicians to both study the impact of fighting in the league and to recommend changes in the landscape meant to minimize, if not eliminate, sanctioned fistfights on the ice.
It is time for the NHL to evolve. The league that keeps hitting itself in the head is likely to discover it will feel so good when it — and the punching — stops.